Rhetoric about fairness tends (quite mistakenly) to “grandfather in” special privileges like my low assessment—or a union worker’s protection from foreign competition. Even when those privileges are unfair to begin with, they get treated like moral entitlements just because they’ve been around a long time. That’s a recipe for inertia, because it means that any attempt to correct an ongoing source of unfairness ends up getting assailed as unfair in its own right. According to the Grandfather Fallacy, my assessment can never rise and the union worker’s wages can never fall. Issues of morality are always clearest on the playground. When a schoolyard bully is caught extorting his classmates’ lunch money and ordered to reform, we don’t worry that it is unfair to deprive him of his traditional income source. Nobody—not even the bully’s own grandfather—would defend that schoolyard version of the Grandfather Fallacy.Read more at location 1058

We may disagree about what that moral standard should be, but attempts to resolve our disagreement should be a lot more enlightening than “I have a right to my agricultural subsidy because it’s been there for as long as I can remember.”Read more at location 1075

Is it fair to reform the welfare system at the expense of its neediest beneficiaries? That’s the wrong question. The concept of “fairness” properly applies not to a change in benefits, but to a level of benefits. The traditional approach invites us to ask whether welfare benefits should go up or down. The zero-based approach demands that we go directly to the question: What is the right level of welfare benefits? The answer to that question should be a number, not a word like “less” or “more.”